To signal that he was finished, Noboru Wataya drained the water remaining in his glass, called the waiter, and ordered more.
“Do you have anything else to say?” I asked.
Noboru Wataya responded this time with a single small shake of the head.
“In that case,” I said to Malta Kano, “where does the proper order come into this discussion?”
Malta Kano took a small white handkerchief from her bag and used it to wipe the corners of her mouth. Then she picked up her red vinyl hat from the table and set it on top of the bag.
“I’m certain this is all very shocking to you, Mr. Okada,” she said. “And for my part, I find it extremely painful to be speaking about such things with you face-to-face, as you can imagine.”
Noboru Wataya glanced at his watch in order to ascertain that the world was still spinning on its axis and costing him precious time.
“I see now,” Malta Kano continued, “that I must tell you this as simply and straightforwardly as possible. Mrs. Okada came to see me first. She came to me for advice.”
“On my recommendation,” interjected Noboru Wataya. “Kumiko came to talk to me about the cat, and I introduced her to Ms. Kano.”
“Was that before I met you or after?” I asked Malta Kano.
“Before,” she said.
“In that case,” I said, “to put things in their proper order, it went something like this. Kumiko learned about your existence from Noboru Wataya, and she went to see you about the lost cat. Then, for some reason that is still not clear to me, she hid from me the fact that she had already met you, and arranged for me to see you—which I did, in this very place. Am I right?”
“That is approximately correct,” said Malta Kano, with some difficulty. “My first discussion with Mrs. Okada was strictly about the cat. I could tell there was something more to it than that, however, which is why I wanted to meet you and speak with you directly. Then it became necessary for me to meet with Mrs. Okada one more time and to ask about deeper, personal matters.”
“Which is when Kumiko told you she had a lover.”
“Yes. In summary, I believe that is the case. Given my position, it is not possible for me to go into any greater detail than that,” said Malta Kano.
I released a sigh. Not that sighing was going to accomplish anything, but it was something I had to do. “So, then, Kumiko had been involved with this man for some time?”
“Two and a half months or thereabouts, I believe.”
“Two and a half months,” I said. “How could it have been going on for two and a half months and I didn’t notice a thing?”
“Because, Mr. Okada, you had absolutely no doubts about your wife,” said Malta Kano.
I nodded. “That’s true. It never once crossed my mind. I never imagined Kumiko could lie to me like that, and I still can’t really believe it.”
“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”
“Not an easy ability to come by,” said Noboru Wataya.
The waiter approached and refilled my coffee cup. A young woman at the next table was laughing out loud.
“So, then,” I said to Noboru Wataya, “what is the ultimate purpose of this gathering? Why are the three of us together here? To get me to agree to divorce Kumiko? Or is there some deeper objective? There did seem to be a kind of logic to what you said earlier, but all the important parts are vague. You say Kumiko has a man and has left the house. So where did she go? What is she doing there? Is she by herself or is she with him? Why hasn’t Kumiko gotten in touch with me? If it’s true she has another man, that’s the end of that. But I won’t believe it’s true until I hear it directly from her. Do you see what I mean? The only ones who count here are Kumiko and me. We’re the ones who have to talk to each other and decide things. You’ve got nothing to do with this.”
Noboru Wataya pushed his untouched glass of iced tea aside. “We are here to inform you of the situation,” he said. “I asked Ms. Kano to accompany me, thinking it would be better to have a third party present. I don’t know who Kumiko’s other man is, and I don’t know where she is now. Kumiko is all grown up. She can do as she pleases. But even if I knew where she was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you. She hasn’t gotten in touch with you because she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“She did want to talk to you, apparently. How much could she have told you? You and she are not very close, as I understand it.”
“Well, if you and she were so damn close, why did she sleep with another man?” said Noboru Wataya.
Malta Kano gave a little cough.
Noboru Wataya went on: “Kumiko told me she has a relationship with another man. She said she wants to settle everything once and for all. I advised her to divorce you. She said she would think about it.”
“Is that all?” I asked.
“What else is there?”
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t believe that Kumiko would go to you with something so important. You’re the last person she would consult on such a matter. She would either think it out for herself or speak to me directly. She must have said something else to you. If she had to talk to you in person, it must have been about something else.”
Noboru Wataya allowed the faintest possible smile to play over his lips—a thin, cold smile like a sliver of a moon hovering in the dawn sky. “This is what they mean by letting the truth slip out,” he said, in a soft but clearly audible voice.
“Letting the truth slip out,” I said, testing the expression for myself.
“I’m sure you see my point,” he said. “Your wife sleeps with another man. She runs out on you. And then you try to pin the blame on someone else. I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. Look, I didn’t come here for my own pleasure. It was something I had to do. For me, it’s just a waste of time. I might as well be throwing my time into the gutter.”
“When he had finished speaking, a deep silence settled over the table.
“Do you know the story of the monkeys of the shitty island?” I asked Noboru Wataya.
He shook his head, with no sign of interest. “Never heard of it.”
“Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”
I drank the rest of my coffee.
“As I sat here looking at you,” I continued, “I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it.”
Noboru Wataya’s face wore no expression of any kind. The smile was gone, but neither was there any shadow of annoyance. All I could see was one small wrinkle between his eyebrows, and I could not recall if it was something that had been there before.
“Are you catching my drift, Mr. Wataya?” I went on. “I know exactly the sort of man you are. You say I’m like garbage or rocks. And you think you could smash me to bits anytime you felt like it. But things are not that simple. To you, with your values, I may well be nothing but garbage and rocks. But I’m not as stupid as you think I am. I know exactly what you’ve got under that smooth, made-for-TV mask of yours. I know your secret. Kumiko knows and I know: we both know what’s under there. If I wanted to, I could tell it to the world. I could bring it out into the light. It might take time, but I could do it. I may be a nobody, but at
least I’m not a sandbag. I’m a living, breathing human being. If somebody hits me, I hit back. Make sure you keep that in mind.”
Noboru Wataya went on staring at me with that expressionless face of his—a face like a chunk of rock floating in space. What I had said to him was almost pure bluff. I did not know Noboru Wataya’s secret. That he had something profoundly warped inside him was not difficult to imagine. But I had no way of knowing with any concrete certainty what that might be. My words, though, seemed to have jabbed at something in there. I could read the effect on his face. He didn’t respond to me the way he always did to his opponents in televised panel discussions: he didn’t sneer at my words or try to trip me up or find some clever opening. He sat there in silence, without moving a muscle.
Then something very odd began to happen to Noboru Wataya’s face. Little by little, it started to turn red. But it did this in the strangest way. Certain patches turned a deep red, while others reddened only slightly, and the rest appeared to have become weirdly pale. This made me think of an autumn wood of blotchy colors where deciduous and evergreen trees grew in a chaotic mix.
Eventually, without a word, Noboru Wataya stood up, took his sunglasses from his pocket, and put them on. The strange, blotchy colors still covered his face. They looked almost permanent now. Malta Kano remained perfectly still in her seat, saying nothing. I myself adopted an expression of complete indifference. Noboru Wataya began to say something to me but, in the end, seemed to have decided against it. Instead, he walked away from the table and disappeared into the crowd.
•
For a time after Noboru Wataya left, Malta Kano and I said nothing to each other. I felt exhausted. The waiter came and offered to refill my coffee cup, but I sent him away. Malta Kano picked up her red hat from the table and stared at it for a few minutes before setting it down on the chair next to her.
I sensed a bitter taste in my mouth. I tried to wash it away by drinking some water, but this did no good.
After another short interval, Malta Kano spoke. “Feelings need to be let out sometimes. Otherwise, the flow can stagnate inside. I’m sure you feel better now that you have said what you wanted to say.”
“A little,” I said. “But it didn’t solve anything. It didn’t bring anything to a conclusion.”
“You don’t like Mr. Wataya, do you, Mr. Okada?”
“Every time I talk to that guy, I get this incredibly empty feeling inside. Every single object in the room begins to look as if it has no substance to it. Everything appears hollow. Exactly why this should be, I could never explain to you with any precision. Because of this feeling, I end up saying and doing things that are simply not me. And I feel terrible about it afterward. If I could manage never to see him again, nothing would make me happier.”
Malta Kano shook her head. “Unfortunately, you will be required to encounter Mr. Wataya any number of times again. This is something you will not be able to avoid.”
She was probably right. I couldn’t get him out of my life so easily.
I picked up my glass and took another drink of water. Where had that awful taste come from?
“There’s just one thing I would like to ask you,” I said. “Whose side are you on here? Noboru Wataya’s or mine?”
Malta Kano put her elbows on the table and brought her palms together before her face. “Neither,” she said. “There are no sides in this case. They simply do not exist. This is not the kind of thing that has a top and bottom, a right and left, a front and back, Mr. Okada.”
“Sounds like Zen,” I said. “Interesting enough in itself as a system of thought, but not much good for explaining anything.”
She nodded her head. The palms that she was pressing together in front of her face she now pulled three inches apart, holding them at a slight angle and aiming them toward me. They were small, well-shaped palms. “I know that what I am saying does not seem to make a great deal of sense. And I don’t blame you for being angry. But if I were to tell you anything now, it would serve no practical purpose. In fact, it would ruin things. You will have to win with your own strength. With your own hands.”
“Like on Wild Kingdom,” I said with a smile. “You get hit, you hit back.”
“That’s it,” said Malta Kano. “Exactly.” Then, with all the care of someone retrieving the belongings of a person newly dead, she picked up her handbag and put on her red vinyl hat. When she set the hat on her head, Malta Kano conveyed a strangely tangible impression that a unit of time had now come to an end.
•
After Malta Kano had left, I went on sitting there alone, with nothing particular on my mind. I had no idea where I should go or what I should do if I were to stand up. But of course I couldn’t stay there forever. When twenty minutes had gone by like this, I paid for the three of us and left the tearoom. Neither of the other two had paid.
Divine Grace Lost
•
Prostitute of the Mind
At home, I found a thick letter in the mailbox. It was from Lieutenant Mamiya. My name and address had been written on the envelope in the same bold, handsome characters as before. I changed clothes, washed my face, and went to the kitchen, where I drank two glasses of cold water. Once I had had a moment to catch my breath, I cut the letter open.
Lieutenant Mamiya had used a fountain pen to fill some ten thin sheets of letter paper with tiny characters. I flipped through the pages and put them back into the envelope. I was too tired to read such a long letter; I didn’t have the powers of concentration just then. When my eyes scanned the rows of handwritten characters, they looked like a swarm of strange blue bugs. And besides, the voice of Noboru Wataya was still echoing faintly in my mind.
I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes for a long time, thinking of nothing. It was not hard for me to think of nothing, the way I felt at the moment. In order not to think of any one thing, all I had to do was think of many things, a little at a time: just think about something for a moment and fling it into space.
It was nearly five o’clock in the evening when I finally decided to read Lieutenant Mamiya’s letter. I went out to the veranda, sat leaning against a pillar, and took the pages from the envelope.
The whole first page was filled with conventional phrases: extended seasonal greetings, thanks for my having invited him to my home the other day, and profound apologies for having bored me with his endless stories. Lieutenant Mamiya was certainly a man who knew the civilities. He had survived from an age when such civilities occupied a major portion of daily life. I skimmed through those and turned to the second page.
Please forgive me for having gone on at such length with these preliminary matters [it began]. My sole purpose in writing this letter today, knowing full well that my presumptuousness in doing so can only burden you with an unwanted task, is to inform you that the events I recently told you about were neither a fabrication of mine nor the dubious reminiscences of an old man, but are the complete and solemn truth in every particular. As you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the years go by. Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.
Up to and including this very day, I have never told any of these things to anyone but you, Mr. Okada. To most people, these stories of mine would sound like the most incredible fabrications. The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.
Even now I can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, I fe
el I am remembering events that happened yesterday. I can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; I can even smell them. I can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. I can feel the dry, sandy wind against my cheeks. By comparison, it is the subsequent events of my life that seem like delusions on the borderline of dream and reality.
The very roots of my life—those things that I can say once truly belonged to me alone—were frozen stiff or burned away out there, on the steppes of Outer Mongolia, where there was nothing to obstruct one’s vision as far as the eye could see. Afterward, I lost my hand in that fierce battle with the Soviet tank unit that attacked across the border; I tasted unimaginable hardships in a Siberian labor camp in the dead of winter; I was repatriated and served for thirty uneventful years as a social studies teacher in a rural high school; and I have since lived alone, tilling the land. But all those subsequent months and years to me feel like nothing but an illusion. It is as if they never happened. In an instant, my memory leaps across that empty shell of time and takes me back to the wilds of Hulunbuir.
What cost me my life, what turned it into that empty shell, I believe, was something in the light I saw at the bottom of the well—that intense light of the sun that penetrated straight down to the very bottom of the well for ten or twenty seconds. It would come without warning, and disappear just as suddenly. But in that momentary flood of light I saw something—saw something once and for all—that I could never see again as long as I lived. And having seen it, I was no longer the same person I had been.